Chapter 2 HE'S HERE

I woke up smiling.

There was no reason for it, which is usually the best kind. The sun was already bold through the curtains. I showered, pulled on high-waisted shorts, a crop top, and a pair of beat-up black chucks that had seen better days and didn't care. I ate quickly, barely tasting it, and then I was out the door and running.

Dakota's house was only a stretch of familiar road away. I did not knock. I never knocked.

"DAKOTA!"

My voice bounced off the walls as I took the stairs two at a time and shoved his bedroom door open with enough force to announce myself to the entire neighbourhood.

Inside: silence. And snoring.

Half of him was hanging off the bed. His mouth was open. His hair looked like a small animal had nested in it overnight. He was shirtless — which meant I could see the six pack that had absolutely no business being that sculpted on someone who slept like a collapsed building — and wearing only boxers. One arm was draped over his own head as if he had fallen mid-surrender.

He's disgusting. Why do you have a crush on him instead of your mate?

My wolf Audrey's voice was dry as sand.

Would you be quiet? I'm going to scare him.

Whatever.

I crossed the room on the tips of my toes. He didn't stir. He had no idea.

I squatted at the edge of the bed. Measured the distance. Then launched myself — arms and legs spread wide like a star falling from orbit — and landed squarely on top of him.

The sound he made was not human.

"W — what the hell!" His arms locked around me before his eyes were even open, every instinct alive before his mind caught up. His voice was low and wrecked with sleep, and I am not going to say anything further about that.

"Get up, Alpha," I said, grinning into his shoulder. "We have duties to attend to."

He blinked at the ceiling. Then at me. Then at the ceiling again.

"What are you doing in my room, Jenna." It wasn't even a question. It was the tone of a man deeply reconsidering his life choices.

"Your parents left. My parents left. Maddox's parents left. Everyone in this pack is awake and functioning except for you. So." I patted his chest twice and climbed off. "Get up."

He rubbed his face with both hands, slow and resigned, and gave me a smile that had no business being that easy at this hour. "I'm up."

"You're welcome."

"I didn't thank you."

"You were going to." I sat at the edge of his bed and watched him drag himself toward the bathroom. "Now hurry. I want to walk around like a Luna."

He paused at the door. Looked at me over his shoulder. "You're unbelievable."

"I know," I said cheerfully. He shut the bathroom door.

—

We walked through the town — Maddox and Dakota in front, chests up, shoulders squared, every inch the acting Alpha and Beta — and me behind them, because every time I tried to slip between them they closed ranks like a wall that had been briefed on my intentions.

"You're doing this on purpose," I said to their backs.

Neither of them replied. Dakota's shoulders moved with what was unmistakeably a suppressed laugh.

Pack members greeted us as we passed — a nod here, a smile there, a good afternoon from an elder who had known all three of us since before we had any business being trusted with authority. I smiled back at every face. It felt good, that easy rhythm. The town in the amber of late afternoon, people drifting toward their homes, the whole world exhaling.

Alpha Zeke arrived just after noon — two black cars, his Beta Ajax and Third-in-command Blaze stepping out first, followed by their mates, followed by the Alpha himself. His pack had a reputation the way a storm has a reputation: everyone knew what it was capable of, and nobody was entirely comfortable saying so out loud. They came to us for strategy. For wisdom. And they came because their hands, however capable, were better at war than at the quiet, deliberate thinking that prevented it.

I watched their arrival with the careful attention I had learned from standing beside powerful people my whole life. There was something in the posture of Zeke's men — alert, always alert — that reminded you, pleasantly enough, that peace between packs is a choice renewed daily.

Something is coming. And it's coming fast.

I frowned. Audrey?

She went quiet. Shut herself off completely, the way she did when she knew I would argue with what she had to say.

I pushed the feeling down and kept smiling.

—

By evening, we stood on the pack house steps as Alpha Zeke and his company said their farewells.

"I thank you again for this," Alpha Ian said, with the kind of sincerity that lands differently coming from a man of his standing.

"The privilege is mutual," Zeke replied, and he pulled his mate to his side as he said it — a small gesture, barely conscious. She leaned into him without looking up.

My chest tightened at the sight of it. Not with envy, exactly. Something quieter. Something that looked a lot like longing.

I glanced away. Watched my father pull my mother in close. Watched Maddox's mother find his father's hand. Even Alpha Ian pressed his lips to the Luna's forehead, soft and sure.

I looked up at the first stars instead.

Something doesn't feel right.

Audrey again. And again, she vanished before I could ask.

The feeling arrived before the reason did — a warmth crawling up my skin, a prickling at the back of my neck, the particular discomfort of being watched by something that has not yet decided whether to reveal itself.

"You okay?" Anthony was beside me, reading my face the way older brothers learn to.

"No," I said honestly. "Something is wrong. My wolf keeps sensing it and then shutting me out before I can understand what she means."

He held my gaze for a moment, then walked to our father, then to Alpha Ian. I watched the information move through the group quietly — mates steered inside, the Luna guided away, my mother turning back for me before Alpha Ian called me forward.

"Jenna. What exactly is your wolf sensing?"

"She won't say, Alpha. She keeps telling me something bad is coming, then blocking me out the moment I try to ask." I felt Dakota move to my side, his hand settling at the small of my back — not possessive, just present, the way he always was. Maddox straightened beside me.

Alpha Ian looked at us for a long moment, then at the treeline.

"It's probably nothing," he said. And he walked inside.

He's here.

What? Audrey —

Gone again.

"What now?" Maddox asked, watching my face.

"She said 'he's here.'" I shook my head. "I don't know what that means."

"That doesn't make —" Dakota started.

"DAKOTA."

Alpha Ian's voice cut across the courtyard like a blade. He was bearing down on us with a stack of papers in his hand, his expression a portrait of controlled paternal disappointment.

My face went pale. Dakota's went paler. Maddox burst out laughing.

"What is this?" Alpha Ian held the papers up. Dakota stared at his own shoes. I found a sudden and intense interest in my hands. "Did you even read it?"

"I... didn't understand it," Dakota murmured.

A long silence. Then Alpha Ian sighed — the sigh of a man who has made his peace with certain things — and pulled his son into a hug. Dakota's arms went around him without hesitation. I watched them, and something in my chest settled softly.

"I'll teach you," Alpha Ian said. "All right?"

"All right."

A pat on the shoulder. An ordinary, unremarkable moment. The kind that becomes precious only in retrospect.

"Come. Your mother's made deer."

We turned to follow.

The growl came from the trees.

Low. Guttural. The kind of sound that does not ask for your attention — it takes it. And then more of them, layered, from multiple directions at once.

They poured from the treeline — wolves, massive and wrong-coloured and slow-moving, the deliberate pace of something that has already decided it does not need to hurry. Their eyes caught the last of the light. They formed a circle around us with the practiced ease of hunters who had done this before.

Dakota shifted first. The rest of us followed.

We arranged ourselves back to back, a tight circle, growling against the ring of teeth and yellow eyes that pressed in from every side. I howled — sharp, high, a call for my father — but the sound dissolved before it could travel far.

And then the smell hit me.

Pine. Wood smoke. Something clean and deep and devastatingly familiar, as though some part of me had been waiting for it my entire life without knowing what it was waiting for.

I whimpered. I could not help it.

The wolves parted.

He came through the treeline last — a massive grey wolf, dark as storm cloud, with eyes the pale impossible blue of a winter sky. He moved through his pack the way water moves through stone: without hurry, without doubt. They stepped back as he passed. The circle held its breath.

He walked straight toward me.

Dakota stepped in front of me and growled, low and absolute.

The grey wolf stopped. But his eyes never moved from mine.

Then the crack of bones — the terrible, familiar sound of a shift reversing — and a man stood where the wolf had been.

I had heard the name my entire life the way children hear the names of storms — with reverence, with distance, with the unspoken understanding that such things existed in another world from theirs.

Alpha Alcander.

He stood in the dying light of the evening, entirely unbothered by his own nakedness, entirely unbothered by the silence that had swallowed all of us whole. He looked at me with an expression I had no language for yet.

Then he smiled. Slowly. Like something that had been certain for a very long time.

"Mate."